Industrialization as Imagination and Reality: Writing Factory History from Below in Maoist China

This article examines how the masses documented their experiences through writing by focusing on the Write Factory History Movement from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s. It traces how factory workers and grassroots writers, under the coordination of the Chinese Writers’ Association and its local branches, collaborated to produce novels, prose, wall paintings, and other literary forms. Drawing on factory history manuscripts, work group reports, literary magazine commentaries, and other local sources, I analyze the processes, strategies, and consequences of this mass writing endeavor for narrating China’s industrial transformation. I argue that these writing efforts, by weaving workers’ literary labor into the complex processes of China’s industrialization, reshaped Chinese historiography and literature from below. Through their literary production, workers contributed to the rise of a new socialist genre known as “mass history” that intertwined individual accounts with collective experiences, factuality with narrativity, and historical records with literary imagination. By foregrounding factory history writing as both a cultural practice and a historiographical intervention, this article reveals the tensions and compromises embedded in mass literary authorship and offers new insights into the politics of writing history in socialist China and its enduring legacy.